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Ian Haney López is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on racism’s evolution since the civil rights era. A constitutional law scholar and chaired law professor at UC Berkeley, as well as a Senior Fellow at Demos, Haney López is the author of three books and his writings have been featured in dozens of publications, from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com, to Politico, The Nation, Moyers and Company, and The American Prospect.

His most recent book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, lays bare how over the last half century politicians have exploited racial pandering to build resentment toward government that in turn leads many voters to support policies that favor the very wealthiest while hurting everyone else.

West Virginia teachers and school service personnel are on strike. The people who help our kids everyday need our help now. The best thing we can all do right now is to urge our local school boards to...

You may have already seen this--or, then again, you might not want to see it--but Islamophobia is on potent display in Minnesota, in a controversy over a training session on political caucus participation that was co-hosted by an imam. It's chilling to watch the hate-filled comments pop up, juxtaposed against the innocuous (all-American?) words of the speakers. ... See MoreSee Less

Latino groups are gearing up to protest the Oscars, as they should. Latinos represent 17% of the country's population and a whopping 23% of frequent moviegoers--but are all but absent in front and behind Hollywood's cameras.

This is not just a question of career opportunities in Hollywood for an excluded group, or even a matter of how we're represented in the broader culture. The urgency comes especially because of surging anti-Latino racism.

American politicians right now are stoking fear and dread of Latinos--demanding that our society build a wall to keep us out, clamoring that recognizing the long-established ties of Dreamers amounts to "amnesty," insisting that many of us are "illegal" in our very beings.

Now more than ever, major cultural institutions need to fight anti-Latino racism and promote a message of social solidarity and linked fate. Hollywood should be marching in front, not dragging its heels. ... See MoreSee Less

"The human cost of expelling [Salvadorans by ending their protected status] is nearly unbearable. More than half have been in this country for at least 20 years. During that time they have become parents of some 200,000 United States-born citizens. Ten percent of the protected-status Salvadorans are married to legal residents. What exactly does the Trump administration think should become of these families? “Not even a dog would leave their babies behind,” Elmer Pena, an Indianapolis homeowner who has worked for the same company there for 18 years, said to USA Today. His children, United States citizens, are 10, 8 and 6 years old.

"So some number, probably a large number, of the affected individuals won’t leave. They will be forced underground, turned from a life of productive labor to a life in the shadows where, in the age of Trump, immigration agents — who chafed under the Obama administration’s enforcement priorities and whose union supported and cheered Donald Trump’s election — feel free to go so far as to stake out a hospital to pick up and detain an undocumented 10-year-old girl after emergency surgery."

Thanks, Linda Greenhouse, for a cry from the heart against the cruelty of Trump's decision to expel Salvadorans who have been here lawfully for years. ... See MoreSee Less